Plex server is not generating thumbnails, or it is, but it’s not using them. I’m trying to get each TV episode to have its own image as a generated thumbnail. However, Plex refuses. Each episode is a landscape crop of the season artwork, which looks horrible. When I go into server and look under poster for each episode, the thumbnails are there (and usually 2 or sometimes 3 thumbnails), however, they all have that landscaped crop of the season artwork selected. So, I can fix it, if I want to manually go through and change every episode of every tv show I have. I’d be at this for days if I did it, which I’m not going to.
I have removed all shows from the media library and add them in one at a time. It never seems to do anything. Generate Thumbnails is checked for the TV Shows, and scheduled task is set for scheduled maintenance and when added.
The „generate thumbnails“ feature is not creating pictures used as posters. This is about the preview pictures showing during playback, e.g. when fast-forwarding or checking the now-playing section in the server dashboard.
Poster thumbs for episodes are derived from the respective online repository of the agent. If there’s none, some Plex clients will use the poster instead (which will indeed look odd because of the different aspect ratios)
That’s odd. Because until I had to nuke Plex entirely to reinstall (see this post), that is what it did. It took poster artwork from TVDB for the overall show, and another separate one for each individual season, but each episode had a generated thumbnail from that specific episode as the artwork.
I lost that when I had to nuke Plex, but the trade off is that Plex is actually working again.
There has got to be a way to have Plex automatically do this (as it used to) without me having to go to every single episode to choose the thumbnail it generated instead of that horrid cropped poster from the Season poster. I know it used to do that. Did they remove that feature?
I mean, it’s still generating thumbnails for each episode, it’s just not selecting them for display instead choosing that horrible cropped version. Unless those thumbnails are from TVDB as well, in which case it should be using them.
Edit:
It’s doing exactly what I expect it to initially. Putting generated thumbnails on each episode. But when it pulls the metadata from TVDB, it ends up replacing every episode thumbnail with that cropped season poster
Under Settings, Server, Agents, Shows, deselect ‘Local Media Assests (TV)’
All my TV episodes have metadata already embedded, including the Season artwork, which is what it’s grabbing.
With Local Media Assets (TV) turned off, and Generate Thumbnails turned on, now each episode has its own thumbnail.
I’m going to start adding them all back in, I have been using Frasier as my test series, moving it in and out to test it. I’m adding the rest of them and will report back after I’m done.
Cool, but that’s what makes them be displayed as artworks. Generated thumbnails as @tom80H said are previews of the movie or tv show that are shown when you’re fast forwarding it so you can have an idea where you are in the show.
See an example of it here: [RESOLVED] enable thumbnails when skipping
If you don’t use it, disable it in the library settings and it’s gonna save you a ton of cpu processing.
